Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday April 04, 2013 @08:57PM
from the set-it-free dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux developers are now working on open-source 3D support for NVIDIA's Tegra in cooperation with NVIDIA and months after the company published open-source 2D driver code. There are early patches for the Linux kernel along with a Gallium3D driver. The Tegra Gallium3D driver isn't too far along yet but is enough to run Wayland with Weston."

If you want a full open source driver stack, then AMD is THE way to go. I know there's some effort to reverse engineer the NVIDIA closed drivers that's making progress, but there's actually paid AMD employees developing open drivers based on the opened specs for their platform. That's the good news.

Here's the bad news. The progress on the AMD open drivers is sloooooooooow because the number of paid employees working on the drivers is very few and the number of volunteers is very few too.

The silver lining is that as features get implemented, they move forward to new generations pretty nicely with the new Southern Island chipsets being an exception. The state of THOSE open drivers is an absolute mess considering devices with that chipset have been shipping for quite a while. Allegedly, that chipset will be the basis for new cards for a while, so as the support improves for the Southern Islands, new cards should benefit immediately.